websphere or weblogic

I am a comp sci senior and have been seeing more and more jobs require some knowledge of an Application server like weblogic or websphere by IBM. Now I certainly don't have the resources to study both of them (I am extermely competent with Tomcat and apache) Which one should I download and start playing with? Any preferences??

Well, for lack of better advice, you can see which one had more marketshare, or maybe search on a job site and see which jobs are more prevalent. If there's a particular domain (e.g. bio, academia, web services) you want to go into, maybe one is more common in that space. Or maybe you could glace at both (invest an initial 10-20% of your time) and see which looks more promising to you. I suspect the time might may off, as both are similar and you might start to see larger patterns and/or whats confusing with one, might be clearer (and similar) in the other. Of course, when in doubt, there's the tried and true method, a flipping a coin, and then committing yourself 110% to the J2EE vendor religious war, forever scorning those who chosse differently then you. Head blood, tails cript. (Those the names of the major J2EE providers, right? :-p ) --Mark

I have seen reports that Websphere has a somewhat higher market share. The Websphere evaluation will not run on Windows XP, which is why I went with Weblogic...but I have played a bit with Websphere - it is safe to say that if you get to know one very well, as Mark pointed out, it would only take a fraction of the time to learn the other...

Websphere was notoriously buggy in its earlier releases but with 5.0, I think it is better. The biotech industry I'm in now leans toward IBM for stability reasons. BEA stock is getting pretty low whereas the argument that "IBM will always be there" gains effectivity.

Originally posted by John Fontana: I have seen reports that Websphere has a somewhat higher market share. The Websphere evaluation will not run on Windows XP, which is why I went with Weblogic...but I have played a bit with Websphere - it is safe to say that if you get to know one very well, as Mark pointed out, it would only take a fraction of the time to learn the other...

I got Websphere running fine on XP, and yes, Websphere does have larger marketshare in all middleware: portals, app server and integration (according to this quarter's Gartner results). I'd say Websphere is a safe bet.

John Fontana
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Joined: Feb 28, 2002
Posts: 235

posted May 06, 2003 03:51:00

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Originally posted by Christophe Lee:

I got Websphere running fine on XP...

Good news! the last time I tried it was not yet version 5...downloading it now!

Dropped you a private message, but just in case you don't check them: On this good news, I downloaded and installed Websphere 5. But now it cannot start (fails to initialize). Were there any hoops you had to jump through to get it working? I have searched Google for a solution with no luck...

I’ve looked at a lot of different solutions, and in my humble opinion Aspose is the way to go. Here’s the link: http://aspose.com